Red/green doomer/gloomers generally rely on two (basically mutually exclusive) nightmare scenarios to justify the need for Immediate Action these days - environmental disaster caused by catastrophic climate change on one hand, and economic disaster caused by a '
peak oil' scenario on the other (the former has been getting a lot of attention lately due to the steady drumbeat of the global warming lobby, leaving the latter a bit out of fashion). Yesterday, Dad Atkinson forwarded me
this recentish opinion piece from techno-optimist/libertarian-types Peter Huber and Mike Mills in the WSJ, which reminds us of why the 'peak oil' hobbyhorse is particularly rickety - subscription req'd, so I'll just excerpt 'liberally', adding emphases as I go:
The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.
The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50-a-barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 per barrel for the next 100 years at least.
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
Well, obviously a potential doubling in the extraction costs of oil isn't nothing, and obviously we're going to be using well, well over 30 billion barrels (or barrel equivalents) a year in 100 years, but the point basically stands. You can see where they're going with this.
In sum, it costs under $5 per barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily.
But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco.
Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike -- both up and down -- not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion dollars over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh.
Still, here, as elsewhere with Saudi Arabia (IMO), we probably have the winning hand, ultimately:
The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored.
In a way, I can kind of understand the panicky desperation for red/greens to pour on the hype as hot and fast as possible these days - their apocalyptic phantasmagorias of ecological and/or economic disaster might not be able to be plausibly maintained for much longer. Their bet, I suppose, is that they can successfully scare their way into power and implement their policies and their own official history before anyone's the wiser, and that any injuries to the truth or to world economies inflicted along the way is acceptable collateral damage for a return ticket to a renewable, zero-emission Garden of Eden. I mean, right?
For reasons of energy independence and public health (and, to a lesser extent, the more distant and uncertain goal of controlling CO2 emissions), I basically share most of the ultimate goals of the people I am uncharitably calling 'red/greens', at least in the context of energy policy - in fact, pretty much all Americans do, and our steady march towards cleaner forms of power generation over the past few decades is only the most obvious testament to that. In a sense, I am just kind of hedging their bet by attempting to 'pursue' (or blog about or whatever) a different, more sustainable (or more conservative, if you prefer) rhetorical strategy, one more grounded in technology/policy options that are likely to work without having to resort to extreme scenarios. One big reason for this difference is skepticism towards these climate change/peak oil scenarios, but perhaps the bigger, more personal reason is alluded to in
this Marginal Revolution post from a couple of weeks ago that 'coincidentally' quotes from the provocative-sounding
new book recently released by Messrs Huber/Mills:
What most of us think about energy supply is wrong. Energy supplies are unlimited; it is energetic order that's scarce, and the order in energy that's expensive... Our main use of energy isn't lighting, locomotion, or cooling; what we use energy for, mainly, is to extract, refine, process, and purify energy itself. And the more efficient we become at refining energy in this way, the more we want to use the final product. Thus, more efficient engines, motors, lights, and cars lead to more energy consumption, not less...
"Waste" is virtuous. We use up most of our energy refining energy itself, and dumping waste energy in the process. The more such wasteful refining we do, the better things get all around. All this waste lets us do more life-affirming thing better, more cleanly, and more safely.
Shorter: I love all you guys and truly value this life that we share together!!
Longer and more Thoughtful, with choice bits from Wendell Berry and Son House: "
Lemony New Doom," a particularly stirring rant by that crusty old farmer
loitering at the cafe.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the treesevery thousand years.Listen to carrion - put your earclose, and hear the faint chatteringof the songs that are to come.